Chapter 33 #2
“You knew about them?” Silva’s tone was cold enough to shock Wyatt into realizing what he’d just admitted to.
“No,” he said hastily. “I mean, kind of—I saw them together, once. But Dani told me it was over, and that he didn’t know anything.”
“I didn’t,” Kass said.
“Can someone please tell me what’s going on?” Katya said. Dani had never seen her so visibly stressed. “Is that who I think it is?”
“Who?” Oliver said, confused. “Who do you think it is?”
“Lukas Gianakos Jr.,” Wyatt said, like the name left a bad taste in his mouth. “The son of OneiroLabs’s CEO.”
Oliver’s eyebrows shot up. “That’s who you were dating?” they asked Dani. “Why didn’t you tell me?” The mix of colors spilling into her brain told her that Oliver wasn’t sure how to feel about this— a little hurt, a little curious, and a lot perplexed.
“I didn’t know who he was at first,” Dani said, beseeching. “And then, once it was over…” She didn’t want to have to explain this again—not when there was so much else going on.
“Should he really be here?” Katya said. “Won’t he turn us in?”
“I’m on your side,” Kass said, irritated. “I didn’t know what was going on until recently. And now I want to stop what’s happening, same as you.”
“And we’re just supposed to believe that?” Wyatt sneered.
“Yeah,” Kass said. “Yeah, you are. And even if you don’t, it doesn’t matter, because you guys were seen by literally a thousand people just a few minutes ago. I don’t think me being here is going to be your biggest problem.”
“He’s right,” Oliver said slowly. “If Dani trusts him, we should at least give him a chance.”
Dani felt a surge of gratitude toward her friend. Wyatt opened his mouth, but Silva held up a hand.
“Stop,” she said. “We’re all under incredible duress right now, and we need to take a beat. I, myself, was unaware of Miss Lionet’s affiliations until tonight. And I assure you, I will take care of it.”
Take care of it? Dani’s stomach squeezed. What did that mean? And where the hell was McKenna?
“But right now,” Silva said, “we have more pressing matters to deal with. The laptop, Mr. Shalhope.”
She held out a hand to him—and as she did, the winds in the gazebo shifted slightly.
Wyatt looked down at the slim device tucked under his arm, then back up at Silva.
Katya and Oliver each took a step closer to his side, and as their expressions hardened with determination Dani understood what was happening.
Silva, however, did not. “Mr. Shalhope,” she said again, sharper. “Give me the laptop.”
“No,” he said. “Not until you tell us the truth.”
“The truth?” she repeated. “The truth about what?”
A small silence followed, but it was a silence with texture.
Dani unwound her hand from Kass’s and stepped forward, moving around Silva to face the woman, whoever she was, with the other four at her back.
Silva’s gray-blue eyes found Dani’s, emotions flitting across them like shapes in a spinning zoetrope, until they finally landed on a rigid resolve.
“So you’ve been spreading your baseless accusations, then?” she said.
“I’m not accusing you of anything,” Dani said. “I’m just asking a question. Who are you?”
“My name is Beatrice Silva,” the woman said coolly. “You know that.”
“We know your name, yeah,” Dani said. Anxiety was burbling like a cauldron brew in her stomach. Kass came to stand behind her, positioning himself between her and the rest of the group. “But we didn’t know who you work for. You never told us.”
“Because it wasn’t important,” Silva said, “and still isn’t. I’ve always been honest that I didn’t come here on my own.”
She was fighting hard against Dani’s ability.
For the first time, maybe because she’d started testing out her gift more, Dani could see that resistance in her mind’s eye—a black barrier between her and the things Silva didn’t want to tell her.
When Dani spoke next, she imagined her words forming a silver sword, which she pierced gently, experimentally, into the barrier.
“But you haven’t been honest about everything, have you?”
The question started to slide through the resistance—but then it struck something rock-hard as her opponent redoubled her efforts. The strain was showing on Silva’s face now, tension tightening the skin around her eyes and mouth.
“I’ve been honest about everything I could be,” she said. “I was sent here by an organization to investigate OneiroLabs with the intention to acquire information that could be used to stop them from hurting people.”
“Stop them from hurting people,” Dani said, “or just stop them?” The sword hadn’t worked, so this time she pictured a torch of brilliant reds, oranges, and golds kindling in her mind, her words licking like flames against Silva’s wall.
“Why can’t both be true?” Silva said, and Dani knew that she’d thinned at least one weak point in her barrier. The woman seemed to recognize it, too, because she set her jaw. “This is a pointless discussion. Mr. Shalhope, give me the laptop, now.”
“Or what?” Wyatt said.
“Or I’ll let the university hoist you on your own petard,” Silva snapped. Her barrier wavered like a force field dangerously close to short-circuiting. The woman closed her eyes, withdrawing again, her resistance restabilizing.
“Were you actually going to develop a cure?” Oliver said, their voice as wobbly as a theremin. “Or was that all an act?”
Silva’s eyes opened, and Dani saw real empathy there. “Of course it wasn’t,” she said. “That was always one of the goals, Mx. Izumi. Exposing OneiroLabs will bring light to your situation and, eventually, an antidote.”
“But that’s not the real reason you came,” Dani said. She felt herself trembling. Gingerbread shifted on her shoulder. “Is it?”
Silva fortified herself as she turned her attention back to Dani, to their battle—the wall hardening against her efforts.
Dani let the torch in her imagination grow, the fire running the length of Silva’s barrier.
Undeterred by the chill of the evening air, beads of sweat broke out on her forehead.
This was a challenge Dani had never faced before: pressing someone who knew about her ability and was throwing every ounce of energy into thwarting it.
She didn’t know what would happen, if there was some invisible line she could cross where she might actually hurt Silva; but in that moment, Dani found she was willing to risk it, to trust herself to know when to stop.
It should have felt wrong, going against everything she stood for, but it didn’t.
As she reached further within herself than she ever had before, plumbing the depths of her power and her conviction, she touched what was at the bedrock of her determination to push Silva to the brink: anger.
Yes, Dani realized, she was angry. She was angry at Silva for not having been up-front with her from the very beginning.
She was angry at the woman for exploiting her, for using her exactly the same way her parents had, but cloaking herself in the guise of righteousness and justice.
More than anything, though, Dani was angry at herself—for falling for it, for letting herself be used.
She’d wanted to believe she’d become savvy enough to detect a bullshitter when she saw one, especially when her ability was supposed to help her root out the essence of a person.
It had failed her this time, and she had failed herself—along with Oliver, whom she’d so wanted to help; McKenna, whom she’d roped into this; and Kass, whom she’d hurt along the way.
But she wasn’t just angry—she was tired.
She was tired of letting other people dictate what she should do.
She’d thought she was taking control of her own life by rejecting her ability for so many years, when really, she was just letting her parents rule her in a different way.
She’d thought choosing to help Silva was a sign that she was healing, that she had autonomy over who she could trust and what decisions she made, only to discover that the woman had been manipulating her all along.
Dani was sick of it. And she’d be damned if she let another adult’s actions determine what route her future took.
So she threw everything she had at Silva’s barrier in that moment, allowing the heat of her anger to fan the flames in her mind, willing it to burn down the wall that stood between her and what Silva didn’t want to say.
Gingerbread’s talons dug into her shoulder, and she used the pain as fuel, the presence of Kass and the others behind her as strength.
She wasn’t alone anymore, a lost kid trying to find her way in the world, hiding pieces of herself. She had people. She had a home.
Silva lifted her head, eyes widening, the muscles in her neck taut as she made one final stand.
“Tell us the truth,” Dani said. “You have to fucking tell us.”
The flames rose up, and Silva let out a primal cry of frustration. “Fine!” she said. “You want to know the truth? Here it is. No, pure altruism didn’t send me here. Altruism doesn’t pay the bills.”
“Let me guess,” Katya said. The sirens were growing louder now, the police closing in on the museum. “Somnio does.”
“Yes, it does,” Silva said, “and I fail to see why that is such a sin. What does it matter who’s behind it, as long as we all get what we came for?”
“What does it matter?” The question tore out of Wyatt’s throat like he couldn’t keep it in any longer.
“What does it matter? It matters because this whole time we were sticking our necks out for you and you were lying to us. I guess this is why you never went with us on any of the missions, huh? Couldn’t risk OneiroLabs recognizing you. ”
“You agreed to my terms, Mr. Shalhope.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I wouldn’t have, if I had all the information. How’d you manage to weasel your way into getting a professor spot here in the first place? You embellished your resume? Got fake references willing to lie for you?”
“I fail to see how that is relevant,” Silva said sharply. “I applied for the post, and Fox’s Leap accepted. If you all could stop being such children about this, you’d see that it changes nothing. Now give me the laptop.”
“Wyatt,” Katya said abruptly. “We’ve come this far. Just give it to her.”
“You can’t be serious,” Oliver said. They seemed calm on the surface, but underneath that, Dani sensed something deeper, a well of hurt. “You would just let her have everything she wants, after what she did?”
“I know,” Katya said, “and I’m not ha—”
“I trusted you,” Oliver said to Silva, prompting a mental swirl of red and black for Dani. “We all trusted you.”
“If you give her that laptop,” Kass said, “you’ll never hear from her again.
Sure, maybe she’ll keep her promise to expose OneiroLabs, and the trial participants will be able to come forward eventually.
But let me guess, that’ll only happen once Somnio has its own product to launch as an alternative, without all the problematic side effects? ”
“Shit,” Wyatt said. “I bet he’s right.” This admission clearly caused him no small amount of pain.
Katya exhaled a frustrated breath. “Come on, you can’t listen to Gianakos’s son. He has every reason in the world to be biased.”
“Biased?” Kass said with a laugh. “I mean, sure. But I also know how these things work. I won’t stop you if you all want to give her the formula, I’m just telling you what’s probably going to happen.”
“We’re so close,” Katya said, looking to the others with a pleading note in her voice. “Are we really going to give up everything we worked for? The money she promised?”
Dani was studying Silva’s face carefully as Katya spoke, and she caught the almost imperceptible quaver that passed under her skin at the word money. A sickly puce crossed Dani’s mind like a puff of pollen.
“There is no money,” Dani said slowly. “Is there?”
Silva paused, calculating her response. “No,” she said at last. Katya made a wounded noise.
If there was no money, there was likely no job waiting for her, either.
Silva ignored her; the woman seemed weary now, impatient.
“And here I thought you were, ironically, the easiest to deceive. Brava to you for working it out, after all.”
At that moment, Gingerbread launched himself from Dani’s shoulder, up and over the iron fence, liberating a long, haunting call from the depths of his throat as he flew across the meadow.
The entire group turned to watch him go, tracing his flight path over to the forest, where a cluster of figures was emerging from the trees.
The shadows peeled away as they came forth, carving out the shapes of a gathering representative of the army rampaging inside: rabbits, a pair of foxes, a wolf in its new winter coat, scattered squeaking field mice and hedgehogs doing their best to keep up.
There was even a small black bear standing side by side with the tallest quadruped of the bunch, an elegant auburn stag, his antlered head lifted proud above the rest, and on his back a creature emanating an ethereal light.
Her body was phosphorescent from the scales of her gown, and as the stag stepped onto the open lawn Dani beheld the amber fire in McKenna’s eyes.
She had never seen her friend like this before, not even with her strongest glamours.
Dani had the feeling this was the full expression of her fae side, a power McKenna rarely called on.
A breeze moved across the meadow from the trees, carrying the scent of rotting wood and jasmine. Dani breathed it in, the smell of death and Elysium, the exhale from the lungs of a goddess, and she knew what she had to do.
Wyatt, she thought to him over the shell. We’re going to need you.
She expected him to come back with confusion, to question her further, but all that he thought to her was: Ready when you are.
“Enough of this,” Silva said. The sight of McKenna leading a host of animals out of the wilderness had obviously perturbed her, not to mention the flashing lights and screaming sirens now surrounding the museum from all sides. “Move aside, Miss Lionet.”
“No,” Dani said. She reached for Kass’s hand and threaded her fingers through his. She didn’t have to be the person anyone wanted her to be—not her parents, and certainly not Silva. It was time to prove it. “I won’t. And for the record, fuck you.
“Wyatt,” she said. “Now!”
He didn’t hesitate. “Everyone grab on to me!” he cried, and Dani stepped backward, her free hand circling his wrist, while Katya and Oliver, catching on quickly, seized him by either arm.
Dani savored the wild, ramshackle horror in Silva’s eyes in the instant before the world telescoped around them and Wyatt’s portal sucked the group into its vortex, taking them away from the gala, away from this nightmare, and away from the woman they never should have trusted.